The Progress of Machine Translation and How it Changes the World

We aim to strengthen Japanese companies competitiveness in global industry and increase the number of visitors to Japan, by implementing machine translation technology in society. We are currently working with collaborating companies on a system that assists with the translation of uncommon words, which is one issue plaguing AI-powered machine translation, and a method that can realize high-performance machine translation from a small amount of bilingual data.

In the last couple of years, machine translation has vastly improved in accuracy as a result of the development and release of artificial intelligence systems (neural machine translation systems). Their output is now almost perfect, and is even said to be at the same level as human translation. However, machine translation requires a large amount of bilingual text, it can still produce omissions and errors, and words that are not used very often such as proper nouns are often mistranslated. As a result, machine translation is still a flawed tool, and the world’s researchers are striving to fix its problems.

As one method to solve the problem of mistranslating proper nouns, we are looking into a method that treats a character string, instead of a word, as one unit. As a result, we have developed a method that can translate proper nouns while simultaneously using information on character strings and morphemes [1]. We have also developed a method that can realize high-performance machine translation from even a small amount of bilingual data in individual fields. In fields for which not a lot of bilingual data has been produced, we have developed a method that involves first using the translation results of an existing commonly-used translation system to then create a machine translation system for a specific field. If a human manually edits the machine translation output, the system tries to post-edit [2] using cloud based volunteer support, and translation results improve.

Fig.1 Neural machine translation system that simultaneously uses character strings and morphological information

For a long time, we have conducted collaborative research on the implementation of machine translation in cooperation with airline companies and automotive companies [3]. Making use of the great improvements made to the accuracy of neural machine translation, we have begun the implementation of this technology into society through collaboration with corporations by co-developing a new service that utilizes machine translation technology, providing translation technology for multilingual information services aimed at foreign visitors to Japan, and providing technological support for improving translation systems.

Fig.2 Creation of a global community utilizing cloud based post-editing

Incorporating highly powerful machine translation systems into everyday life will make it possible, in the industrial world, for example, to provide information on products and services in different languages and achieve overseas expansion that was previously not possible. In the tourism sector, it will become possible to provide information on areas and establishments which are not widely known overseas to hopefully increase the number of tourists visiting Japan. This technology will also benefit foreign residents in Japan by providing them with information that was previously only available in Japanese in different languages.